Team

Christy Fujio

Christy Fujio is a human rights lawyer with more than 15 years of experience building and supporting global programs in diverse settings to improve access to justice and protection services, including medical, mental health, shelter, and livelihoods. She is a founding member of Synergy for Justice, and has been working with Syrian doctors and lawyers to document torture and sexual violence since 2013. Ms. Fujio has extensive experience training judicial actors, law enforcement, and other government officials to strengthen their capacity to uphold rule of law, human rights, and international treaty commitments. Ms. Fujio is a founding member of the Global Protection Cluster (GPC) Task Team on Anti-Trafficking in Humanitarian Action, liaising regularly with UN agencies, INGOs, and donors and stakeholders. Ms. Fujio’s substantive areas of expertise include juvenile justice, trafficking, asylum and refugee law, torture, forensic medical documentation, sexual and gender-based violence, and women, peace, and security agenda.

Dr. Ingrid Elliott MBE

Dr. Ingrid Elliott MBE is a criminal investigator and prosecutor with over 20 years of experience, including investigating and prosecuting international crimes at the Bosnia State Court and then UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She led the design and negotiation of the legal and operational framework of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. She has been on the UK Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Team of Experts since 2013. She has worked on investigation and response to sexual violence in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Libya, and Myanmar/Bangladesh. Ms. Elliott has been working as part of Synergy’s international multi-disciplinary team with Syrian doctors and lawyers since 2013 to build medical expert documentation and holistic community responses to Syrian conflict-related sexual violence, including initiatives to tackle stigma. She has also worked closely with investigators and prosecutors across Eastern African and the Indian Ocean to help build systems, skills, and tools for better justice for wildlife trafficking and other organised crimes. She is the primary drafter of The Murad Code and Commentary, a Global Code of Conduct for Documenting Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.

Stephanie Barbour

Stephanie Barbour is an international criminal investigator, analyst, and legal adviser with over 13 years of experience in domestic, hybrid, and international criminal justice initiatives. Her work has focused on Rwanda, the Balkans, Nepal, Syria, Iraq, and the Central African Republic. Her expertise lies in design and delivery of capacity-building and mentoring programmes for national actors and building successful private criminal investigations, particularly in relation to the collection and analysis of sexual and gender-based crimes. She lectures, publishes, and consults on a range of issues.

Kathryne Bomberger

Kathryne Bomberger has worked in the field of international relations, human rights, politics and conflict prevention for over 25 years.  Since 1998, she has led the development of ICMP, which is today the world’s leading human rights and rule of law organization dedicated exclusively to helping governments and others address missing persons issues arising from war, human rights violations, migration, organized crime, natural disasters and other causes. She was appointed ICMP Director-General in 2004.

Ms Bomberger has worked in conflict and post-conflict areas as well as in areas affected by disasters and by organized crime (including the Western Balkans, Cyprus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Mexico, Colombia, Haiti, the Philippines and Vietnam), helping governments, courts, prosecutors, NGOs, scientists, academics and others to build capacity to address the cross-cutting issue of missing persons, including through the development of effective institutions and legislation. She has spoken on the issue of missing persons at countless public forums, including the United Nations and the US Congress, and she has been interviewed by the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Economist and many other media outlets, as well as participating in TV and film documentaries. Her awards include recognition by the President of France as a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.

Erin Gallagher

Erin Gallagher is a professionally trained international criminal and human rights investigator with 25 years of experience. She has investigated and participated in national and international criminal trials for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), including three Srebrenica genocide trials; the International Criminal Court (ICC); and numerous other trials in the state of California. She was Director of Investigations for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) where her team documented the attacks on medical facilities in Syria and sieges upon towns, helping to get UN Resolution 2165 and 2191 passed to send medical aid convoys into Syria. She has worked as a gender advisor for UN Commissions of Inquiry for Libya and Syria, investigating sexual violence and torture. She has also deployed as an SGBV expert to Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, and Bangladesh. She is an Expert Commentator for the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative (PSVI) Protocol on Investigating and Documenting Sexual Violence in Conflict. She teaches for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) and Justice Rapid Response (JRR). Prior to her international work, she worked as a police officer and senior investigator for the San Francisco Police Department and District Attorney’s Office from 1995-2006, investigating cold cases, homicide, sexual assault, and sexual child abuse.

Niku Jafarnia

Niku Jafarnia is a human rights lawyer with expertise in issues related to armed conflict and civilian protection in the Middle East/North Africa region. She is currently working with the Center for Civilians for Conflict (CIVIC), investigating violations of international law and advocating for civilian protection in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Previously, she worked with Mwatana for Human Rights, a Yemeni civil society organization, to pursue justice for survivors of the Yemeni war in international courts and through research and reporting. She also has eight years of experience providing legal support and advocating for refugees’ and asylum-seekers’ rights in Turkey, Greece, Kenya, Jordan, Lebanon, Germany, and the US. She holds a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

Tejal Jesrani

Tejal Jesrani is an attorney and member of the NY Bar with 20 years of experience in international public law, including implementation of international conventions, capacity building and research in countering human trafficking, migrant smuggling and transnational organized crime. She is a Program Officer in the Crime Research Section of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and has worked there in various roles for 15 years. She regularly publishes on international criminal justice and transnational crime issues and her current research includes undertaking focus groups with prisoners on recidivism and community safety audits to prevent and combat trafficking in persons. She is also the head of DEI for Women in Foreign Policy, an organization that seeks to achieve a foreign policy workforce fully representative of contemporary society. Ms. Jesrani has also worked in the areas of immigration law, international human rights and international criminal law. She was a Dean’s Fellow at the War Crimes Research Office at American University, Washington College of Law, worked as an Attorney Advisor at the United States Department of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review and at Human Rights Watch as Women’s Rights Associate.

Dr. Coleen Kivlahan

Dr. Coleen Kivlahan is a senior physician executive leader for primary care services at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).  She is engaged in U.S. health policy, redesigning care, and public health. Dr. Kivlahan is a family physician with clinical experience in primary and complex care and has worked in health care at the local, state, national and international levels. Her special interest is health and human rights, and she has been a skilled trainer in the scientific documentation of human rights violations for the past twenty years. At UCSF, she is the lead faculty member for a new medical student rotation on immigrant health and forensic evaluations of torture, she leads the forensic evaluation clinic with UCSF faculty and students, and is a Chairperson of the UCSF Health and Human Rights Initiative. Dr. Kivlahan worked for five years in the Democratic Republic of Congo with Physicians for Human Rights, followed by more than five years training doctors during the Syrian conflict with Synergy for Justice. She has also worked in Guatemala, Sierra Leone, and Belgium on torture and ill-treatment medical consequences. She has authored multiple articles and book chapters on this subject. 

Mera Eftaiha

Mera Eftaiha oversees Synergy’s portfolio of programming and has 15 years cumulative experience in humanitarian and international development programs in the Middle East and north and central Africa. Mera served in senior management roles in two complex emergency programs-Iraq and South Sudan, where she oversaw large program teams working on emergency health and human rights protection programming with a focus on access to justice, emergency protection, mental health and psychosocial support and women empowerment programs. Mera has also worked on overseeing emergency health programming in Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, and Libya. Mera is a native Arabic speaker who is also fluent in English.

Juan Esteban Vivas

Juan Esteban Vivas provides overall finance oversight and support to the program team. Juan has over 16 years of experience working in and overseeing financial operations of non-governmental organisations and private sector organisations. He was the country finance manager at Medicines Sans Frontiers in the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Colombia, Haiti, Niger, Paraguay, Bolivia, South Sudan, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Mexico. Juan also worked with Case Matrix Network as a finance officer, and with CIJA as a finance project officer and operations and planning manager. Juan is a certified public accountant with a BA in Business Administration and a Master's degree in Project Management. He is a native Spanish speaker and is fluent in English and French.

Sari Bernardo

Sari Bernardo oversees Synergy's Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) functions and supports the organizational development needs of the partner organisations through systematic mapping, benchmarking and monitoring of set milestones. Sari has over 15 years of experience working with INGOs managing multisectoral humanitarian programmes and teams in conflict areas and natural disaster affected areas including India, Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Turkey/Syria and MENA region. For the past 5 years Sari has been focusing on consultancies building local partners capacity and organisational structures. She is a native Finnish speaker, fluent in English.

Nathalie Dermesrobian

Nathalie Dermesrobian is responsible for overseeing and supporting project management of the project implementation according to the project workplans, budgets and timelines, monitoring and recording partner compliance and performance. Nathalie has over 7 years of experience working with local and International NGOs monitoring project implementation in humanitarian and development programmes. Nathalie was the legal field officer at the Norwegian Refugee Council in Lebanon and the program officer in the National Center for State Courts in Lebanon. Nathalie has graduated with a Master’s degree in Security, Peace and Conflict studies after having completed her Master’s in Public Law. She is native Arabic and Armenian speaker, fluent in English and French.